19.10: "A Visit From St. Nicholas", American Poem
(No worries, Krista -- I realize I owe a write-up here)
The reasons I selected Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" are two-fold -- one appeals to the evelasting child in all of us, while the other appeals to our intellectual side and to an interest in the origins of one of America's greatest native myths."
Twas the night before Christmas ..." is a refrain I've heard as long as I can remember in association with the Christmas season. Therefore, "A Visit from St. Nicholas" is a comfortable, familiar refrain, and a reliable remnder of good times past and present. It is the Ur-story of the kindly gift-giver, the "true" account that made clear what St. Nick did early each Christmas morning, how he did it, what he acted like, and more -- Even the reindeer were spelled out by name (and, boy, did I know them all as a tyke ... except where was Rudolph?). And it was all told through the eyes of a gob-smacked eyewitness. And us kids could certainly understand that wonder. The poem is ever associated with good memories -- kindergarten readings, animated Christmas specials, grade-school plays, and much more. In the hear and now, I enjoy passing the poem down to my children, first through board books, later through lavishly illustrated hardbacks, and now -- well,
there's an app for that (for real -- scroll to bottom).
And now, for my scholarly interest in the poem:
The prolific skeptic Martin Gardner wrote
an introduction to the 1976 paperback edition of L. Frank Baum's The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (pp145-150 of link). In it he gave an engrossing scholarly summary of the origins of the American Santa Claus legend. Gardner recounts the Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam and how they brought their legend of Sinterklaas to the New World. Gardner also cites Washington Irving's (of
Sleepy Hollow fame) 1809 history of New York City, which described the Dutch-American tradition of hanging stockings by the fire so that Saint Nicholas could fly over in a wagon and drop goodies down the chimney and into the waiting stockings.
Anyway. What Gardner credits Moore's poem with doing is to tie together a few loose ends and firm up the St. Nicholas legend into a form we recognize today as Santa Claus. Moore seems to have created the idea of St. Nick descending the chimney himself. The reindeer may have been part of the Dutch-American folklore, but the few earlier accounts there are show St. Nicholas being drawn by one reindeer. Moore's innovation was to describe an entire team of eight reindeer, each individually and indelibly named. Finally, Moore dresses St. Nicholas in fur-lined apparel and thus gives a non-subtle hint regarding the saint having a place of residence in the far north (later the North Pole).
Moore first wrote "A Visit from St. Nicholas" for his children in 1822, and it was published anonymously in a Troy, NY newspaper the next year. From there, the poem spread far and wide as an anonymous piece. Moore only acknowledged authorship in 1837, and -- at his children's behest -- included it an anthology of his own poetry in 1844. To quote Gardner: "
None of the serious poems in his 1844 book is now remembered, but the "Visit", which Moore dashed off so carelessly, has become the greatest Christmas poem in the English language"
New York Times poetry critic X.J. Kennedy wrote a review of "Visit" in 1993, which is
well worth the brief read. I'd like to quote a bit here to conclude:
Delving into John Hollander's recent Library of America anthology "American Poetry: The Nine-teenth Century," I was glad to find "A Visit From St. Nicholas" right there along with works by Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Jones Very. Professional deconstructionists may sneer, but popular demand has fixed the poem securely in our national heritage. If Mr. Hollander had left it out, it would have been missed. Statistics are scarce, but it seems likely that Moore's masterwork has been reprinted, recited and learned by heart more often than any other American poem -- and that goes for "The Raven," [redacted] and [redacted].
To be sure, mere popularity doesn't make a work of art great. If it did, then "September Morn," that delicate tribute to skinny-dipping once reproduced on calendars hung in barbershops and pool halls galore, would be a better painting than "Nude Descending a Staircase" any day. And yet a poem like Moore's that has stuck around for 171 years has to have something going for it.
on the mulligan thing. I agree that mulligans suck. I also hate when judges chime in with commentary. But what really sent these drafts downhill is the actual judging IMO. That's why at this point, most of us (I think), just pick stuff we like to have and don't care what score it gets.
